John Bredin (Letters, June 30), while acknowledging a "dumbing down of our culture," still hopes that Hudson County can produce some kind of intellectually-stimulating publication that will "ignite a genuine curiosity about art, and ideas," and" to begin learning real stuff."

Real stuff! We had such a venture here once, or the nearest thing to it, and it was in this very newspaper, good old Hoboken Reporter!

When the Reporter was new, and young, and venturesome, and trying to get a start and attract attention, it began publishing controversial letters by T. Weed. These letters were so bold and unconventional and politically-incorrect and (many of them) taboo (even to mention Israel/Palestine is taboo) that they generated a lively and heated debate. This lively and heated debate ("real stuff") that went on for years, "made" (according to the publisher) the reputation of this newspaper to the public.

A decade's collection of those funny, stimulating letters (1985-1995) was published in a volume called Enough Rope. Give people enough verbal rope, let them express themselves fully, as the Letters page did, and many a participant will hang himself on his own words, for all to see another decade's worth of Letters, the nearest thing we have in our intellectual wasteland to an "intellectual publication" as called for by Mr. Bredin, has now been printed under the name of More Rope. Real stuff!